Patch Notes - Update 1.1

Note that the following patch notes will get localized in other languages as soon as possible and shared via our localized forums, we apologize for the inconvenience.

Hello everyone!

We are excited to share with you this first of many title updates. Keep in mind that this is the beginning and we will be improving with every update. The changes described below will take effect on December 16th. This update will be for all platforms, but PC players will receive the following message during the maintenance: [3-0x80030081] IncompatibleCustomClientVersion. This is normal and it means that you should close your game, have it update, launch it again, and enjoy the improvements we made. Your feedback is valuable to us, so we encourage you to keep sharing your thoughts on the forums and the subreddit, as we read those daily.

Patch Notes Summary:

New Content & Features

Visual Update

DLC Ultra-HD Texture Pack now available for PC Players

Community Health

Implemented an auto-kick feature for intentional team killers

General Tweaks & Improvements

Hit Registration

Fixed bugs on replication and kill cam:

Pawn rotation latency

Shield positioning while rappelling

Shooting and moving while rappelling

Kill cam replication issues

Updated server tick rate for PC (intermittent & temporary)

Playlist Changes

PvP - Ranked playlist HUD has been synced with the Casual playlist - Will be applied in update 1.2 (January)

Renamed Minimal HUD to Hardcore HUD

Ranked Matchmaking Improvements

Increased reliability of end-game skill rank updates.

The penalty for abandoning a ranked game in progress has been temporarily reduced to 8 minutes.

Skill rank icon is now displayed on the game's main screen, next to your level.

Increased the amount of characters available in the chatbox from 32 characters to 128 characters.

Glaz scope visibility enhanced.

Top Community Raised Bug Fixes

Gameplay fixes

Level Design fixes

Online Flow fixes

Visual fixes

UI fixes

Miscellaneous fixes

New Content & Features

Visual Update

DLC Ultra-HD Texture Pack now available for PC players.
The Ultra-HD texture pack will upgrade some of the most common textures in the game, such as characters, and weapons, to a new level of visual fidelity. This higher level of detail can be best appreciated while playing the game in 4K resolution, but it’s not limited to that.

The Rainbow Six Siege team put a lot of effort to try to deliver a solid and scalable experience to the PC community, so those of you running a 4 GB GPU will still be able to enjoy this texture pack from 1080p to 1440p resolutions.

Those of you with the high-end 6+ GB GPUs, you will be able to play the game in sharp 4K resolution, along with these Ultra-HD textures under standard lighting and shading options.
Last but not least, for those of you with the MEGA PCs with dual GPUs and with more than 6 GB of video ram, you will be able to run 4K, with the Ultra-HD textures, and with the highest settings of lighting, and shading which take advantage of tech like displacement mapping.

Note that this is a free DLC and you will have to download it from Steam and Uplay. We hope you enjoy playing the game with these new textures!

If you are interested in more information, as well as screenshots, please click here.

Community Health

Team killing reduction
Implemented an auto-kick feature for intentional team killers.

We have set some parameters that will cause an automatic kick of a griefer within a match. We are trying our best to make the distinction between accidental team killing and intentional team killing. Same goes for intentional hostage killing while playing as Defender. We will be tracking if the auto-kick feature reduces intentional team killing instances and will be adjusting the rigor of the parameters accordingly. Also, for PC, you can now use your mouse wheel in addition to the arrow keys to navigate the player selection screen.

This issue has been noticed since the Open Beta, in which we witnessed an exponential growth of griefers intentionally team killing - 1.3% of the matches were affected at the beginning, and it went as high as 7.8% at the end which is obviously unacceptable. We were glad to observe that over launch, this issue is much less present. We did experience a small growth at first, but it has now plateaued. It had started at 0.9% but later stabilized at 1.8%. We still believe that this is an issue and will be tracking how the new auto-kick feature will affect these statistics.

General Tweaks & Improvements

Hit Registration Improvements

Sharing the answer provided in the AMA earlier this month, with an update about server tick rate:

The hit registration issues are actually multiple issues that we will be working on. Some of them are being addressed in this title update, while others require development time and be addressed later (as soon as possible).

Fixed bugs on replication and kill cam:

Fixed: Pawn rotation latency: the difference between a player’s action, the server’s perception and another player seeing said action had an extra delay due to a bug. This had even more impact on shield wielding Operators since sometimes players using those would think they were protected while they were not because of the additional delay caused by the pawn rotation bug.

Fixed: Shield positioning while rappelling: certain shield angles were not being replicated properly, this caused the shield wielding player to be overprotected in certain cases. This caused hit detection issues for the player shooting at the shield wielding player.

Fixed: Shooting and moving while rappelling: when moving and shooting while in rappel, the hits were sometimes not registered properly by the server.

Improved: Kill cam replication issues: the kill cam was not displaying an accurate representation of hit positions. The point of view seen after death was not the exact point of view of the killer. Moreover, we have instances in which the kill cam shows body parts sticking through walls while they actually weren’t being seen from the killer’s perspective. This has been improved for the next title update, but we still need additional work on this. It is still considered under development.

Updated the server tick rate for PC (intermittent & temporary)
With the goal of improving positioning and shooting replication, we will be deploying a first update on PC in which the player position update rate is set to 60 times per second (vs. the previous 30). Having had conclusive tests internally, we have decided to share this update on PC first because it has a faster deployment speed compared to consoles. Note that these PC tests will be intermittent as we will be trying various configurations until we are satisfied with the outcome. When this feature has been validated with various external tests on PC, we will be deploying this update on consoles as soon as possible.

Connection to wrong data center
Another issue we will be working on is that right now, some players connect to the wrong data centers. If you are not connected to the nearest data center, your gameplay experience will likely not be ideal. We believe that the best solution for this will be to allow the players to select their data centers and that is what we will be working on.

General issues we are aware of:
Although we do have a high ping kick in place, one thing to note is that there are some edge cases in which some players have high ping due to poor internet connection spikes. This affects replication quality for the other players within that person’s match.

We hope that this addresses your concerns and we will make sure to keep you updated as we keep monitoring and improving on this and progress within our plans.

Playlist Changes

Unifying the experiences between Casual and Ranked
PVP - Ranked playlist HUD has been synched up with the Casual playlist - Will be applied in update 1.2 (January)
See this forum post to find out more about the evolution of our playlists over time as well as the specifics of what the Casual and the Ranked playlists consist of. There are still a few differences that will remain (listed in this post).

It is important to note that we are beginning to work on a proper Hardcore playlist, which will be available in early 2016 and will contain a very minimal HUD and a more realistic experience. Until then, we encourage you to try out the ‘Hardcore’ HUD Preset in the Custom Games so that you can experience some of the elements that will be present (or removed) in our future Hardcore mode. Note that this is not a final iteration.

With that, we hope to bring the community the Hardcore mode it deserves. We encourage you to share your feedback with us on what you think the Hardcore mode should be like, as we are still iterating on it.

Custom Games options changes
Renamed Minimal HUD to Hardcore HUD
As a starting point for the future Hardcore Playlist, we have created a Hardcore HUD preset which is currently using the Minimal HUD settings that were previously in our Ranked playlist. We will be iterating on it, with the final goal of establishing a Hardcore HUD preset, and then a full Hardcore Playlist. See previous section for more details about our plans.

Ranked Matchmaking Improvements

Refining the Ranked Skill Rating System
Increased reliability of end-game skill rank updates.
Skill-based matchmaking now casts a much narrower net. By default it now tries to match you with players +/- 1 rank away from you. If it can't find anything, it increases by 1 rank in each direction every 30 seconds. This will increase the average duration of ranked matchmaking, but we feel that they should stay bearable now that more players are hitting level 20 and playing ranked.

When the outcome of a matchup with a more pronounced skill level gap ends up being contrary to what the system expects (ex: Bronze team wins against Gold team), the skill rating updates will now be less aggressive. Losing/gaining more than 2 ranks at once should be much rarer now.

We believe that the reaction was too intense and caused drastic changes. We will be toning down the variations to offer our players a more stable skill rating experience, which we believe is for the best. We will be diminishing the impact of individual matches and be looking at the overall results of the player in order to set their skill rating. We will be closely monitoring the impact of that change on matchmaking quality and might consider bringing similar changes to Casual in the next patch.

The penalty for abandoning a ranked game in progress has been temporarily reduced to 8 minutes.
We are currently reworking the abandon/reconnect system. We will probably move the abandon penalty back up once we finish overhauling the abandon/reconnect system.

Skill rank icon is now displayed on the game’s main screen, next to your level.

Other Matchmaking ImprovementsPvP & PvE Matchmaking bug fixes.

PVP - Fixed a bug where matchmaking would sometimes use your skill data from the wrong region.

PVE - Fixed a bug where players would sometimes be matched with players from another region.

Spawn killing reduction
PvP - Reduced time to detect Defenders outside from 5 seconds to 2 seconds.
We believe this will reduce the amount of spawn killing, as it will make it impossible for Defenders to rush to the spawn location undetected. Moreover, our game design philosophy is to have the Attackers’ safe haven be outdoors and the Defenders’, indoors. We felt that 5 seconds gave the Defenders too much time to get in position to take down their opponents and made the Attackers too unsafe outside.

Difficulty reduction for Terrorist Hunt Disarm Bomb
PVE – Reduced the maximum number of White Masks and reduced the wave sizes.
Looking at the data of Terrorist Hunt Disarm Bomb success rates, we saw that they were much lower than desired (for example, in Realistic difficulty, we didn’t even have 0.1% of success rate as I am writing this post – by the way, if you are the 0.1%, congratulations! The success rate we are aiming for in Realistic is about 1%, which is what we currently approximately have for the other Terrorist Hunt modes.)

Player Comfort

Written communications improvement
Increased the amount of characters available in the chatbox: from 32 characters to 128 characters.We believe this change will help you and your teammates communicate better.

Visual improvement
Glaz scope visibility enhanced.
We have fine-tuned the filter to reduce the glow and enhance the overall visibility and contrast.

Before:

After:

Top Community Raised Bug Fixes
Please be aware that this is not an exhaustive list and that we are only highlighting fixes that were done about the most commonly raised community bugs.

Gameplay Fixes

Fixed a bug in which the Defenders could exit the building using a deployable shield during Preparation Phase. This was considered an exploit.

Resolved an issue where bullet impacts would not be registered.

Fixed a bug where White Masks would take no damage when getting shot in the abdomen.

Tagging Attackers through the security cameras now properly identify Operator in the HUD.

Fixed a bug where the user could not switch cameras during the prep phase when his/her drone got destroyed.

Fixed a bug where the player could get stuck.

Fixed a bug where the camera would get turned upside down after rappelling.

Fixed a bug where the player got stuck after using the rappel feature.

Opening uPlay overlay now pauses the Situations’ Cinematics.

Level Design Fixes

Fixed a problem where the drone would fall through the map at the start of the preparation phase.

Fixed different bugs in which drones could fall off the map or teleport to random locations when thrown.

Fixed an issue where Twitch’s shock drone would fall through the map when launched from a prone position, backed up against a wall.

Online Flow Fixes

Fixed an issue where squads would get split up when returning to lobby or the menu.

Fixed a bug where the XP and Renown screen post-match would be empty.

Fixed a bug where you could see the enemy team’s operator choices during Selection phase.

You should now be able to see your teammates in the lobby on rematch.

Fixed a PVE renown exploit (hack).

In matchmaking, players searching for a session will now automatically reach step 2 "Joining game session".

Fixed an issue when inviting players which are currently in a lobby.

Fixed error code 0-0x00000602 (received when returning from a matchmaking game to looking for players step).

Fixed connectivity issue in which the session hanged and all players were being disconnected if a character left the session or got disconnected while escorting the hostage

Fixed a game invitation bug in which the former host received matchmaking error 2-0x00000064 if he previously quit a Terrorist Hunt lobby and selected a Squad only game afterwards.

Visual Fixes

Fixed blood color bug.

UI Fixes

Fixed a bug in which text chat character limit would be even shorter than 32 characters.

Fixed bug in which attackers could vote for spawn location during preparation phase in Casual.

Fixed a bug in which the portal menu was shifted to the left when booting the game.

Fixed a bug in which the player was unable to select Invite Players in the Player Profile screen on XB1 and PS4.

Various minor tweaks to improve UI.

Miscellaneous Fixes

Fixed a PC voice chat bug in which inviting players to the game set the squad leader’s voice chat record mode settings to Open.

Fixed a PC bug in which pressing ALT+ENTER in-game while having the personal information panel open would leave the player with no functionality.

Added a clear indication in-game that all Terrorist Hunt modes difficulty levels are intended for a full team of 5.

Fixed a PC bug in which the refresh rate selection was broken.

Localization fixes have been made as we updated the text in multiple languages.

Various connection, stability, performance, errors and crashes issues have been fixed.

Thank you so much for being a part of this with us, we really appreciate your feedback and input. We wish to bring you the best experience possible and will continue to iterate and improve on the game.

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